Let My People Know

"All things are insignificant and bereft of value when compared to the ultimate object of love, the one God"

 

Man clutches at the specific delights of worldly love, even when he knows that it is all derived from God. 

He distinguishes his desires and has his preferences. 

He proceeds from minor cravings to great yearning and covetousness, forever finding things that are more beautiful in his eyes, abandoning one love for another. 

In a single lifetime, man may pass from an intense attachment to toys and modes of sensual gratification to passionate love for people, from an intellectual fervor for ideas to a recognition of his ultimate need for God's nearness. 

The phases of love are familiar enough; what is worthy of consideration is the way they are superseded, one by another, and how the core of each love persists in terms of feeling or sentiment. 

It is not that a person compares them, weighing the smaller against the greater. 

There is simply a recognition, at some stage, of the worthlessness of a certain object of desire, and basically it is a shadow of the knowledge that all things are insignificant and bereft of value when compared to the ultimate object of love, the one God. 

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
 
From The Long Shorter Way, Chapter 43, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz